Kyla Hygysician / Exhibition Design

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2022

Working with a team of four curators, I was the Lead Exhibition Designer for this show, working with graphic designer, Eben Haines. This exhibition explores Guston’s career, the stylistic periods of his work, and his exploration of his own self.

Entry

We built the curved slated entry wall outside of the exhibition as a way to create a transition for the visitor into the show that wasn’t provided by the existing architecture. Through the use of wall color and graphics this also became an inviting canvas for the title and introductory text. The language of the slats integrated with the vaulted roof in the surrounding architecture and also maintained a feeling of openness in a small space.

Color

We drew on Guston’s fondness for the color pink in choosing the color palette for the walls. Subtle shades of pink, lightening as you walk through the show, build up to a bright white in the center space which highlights the 1970s show at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. A warm and inviting brick red color follows the bright white in an intimate space where visitors are asked to stop and share their own reactions and experiences.

Casework

I designed the casework to be looked into, showing supplemental material that influenced Guston’s paintings. Some cases, those with more sensitive viewing material, have a tambour door that can be opened at the visitor’s discretion. I choose the color black as a reference to Guston’s use of a solid black outline against a light background seen in many of the works on view.

Studio space

The studio space in the center of the Marlborough room gallery references the walls in Guston’s own studio in Upstate New York. We recycled old pieces of plywood and added splotches of paint to the unfinished surface to give them the look of walls in a working studio. Small spotlights were mounted to the overhead structure of the space to light the work and avoid shadows.

Contextual Components

An important aspect for the curatorial team was to weave contemporary context throughout the show as a way to continually remind the visitor of the context in which the work was being made and suggest how Guston’s awareness of these events influenced his work.

This was done in two ways. Each gallery has a timeline that combines events in the news cycle with events in Guston’s own life. We placed these vertically, wrapping a corner in each room, as way to keep the information present and easy to find without interfering with the viewing of the work.

Second, as you pass between a gallery focusing on Guston’s period of Abstraction and before you enter the Marlborough room, there is a space filled with 3 projections that cycle through significant news events from the time.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2018

I designed this project working with curators Ben Weiss and Lynda Klich, and graphic designer, Eben Haines.

This exhibition presented 150 postcards, made between WWI and the end of WWII, highlighting them as both historical documents and masterworks of graphic design. Selected posters and film clips were included to demonstrate themes across media.

The exhibition explored a range of themes connected to early 20th-century propaganda: Leaders, Heroes, Villains, Abstractions, Fake News and Mockery. All of the postcards in this exhibition were from the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive.

Defining Space

My first challenge was that the gallery space was two adjoining rooms with seven doorways, very much a pathway in a larger part of the museum—how to get people to stop and feel like they’ve entered a special exhibition with so much competing for their attention?

• In order to do this, I used a language of triangulation to clearly carve out space around the two rooms. This gave me the freedom and flexibility to shape spaces as I needed to fit each section. I used high contrast dark and light colors to make the spaces feel dynamic and enveloping. The floor was created with two different colors of carpet tiles, and the wall and ceiling with paint. These contrasting colors defined distinct sections.

Scale and Quantity

The second challenge of this project was how to show a large quantity of small 2D objects in groupings that were legible and didn’t feel repetitive.

• I designed three different case types to alter the style of presentation and to give the visitor variety of experiences to keep the viewing of similar objects feeling fresh. There were table cases that leaned at an angle against the wall, wall cases that showed the postcards flat against the wall, and shelf-like cases that had two long slots in the shelf ledge, parallel to the wall, allowing the postcards (mounted to plexiglass) to stand in rows parallel to the wall, but freestanding. This idea came from a large central case that was made to show a series of postcards of soldiers in battle. I made that case deck in the same fashion, mounting the postcards to plexiglass so they could slot vertically in the deck, to show the figures en masse. This presentation also allowed to see the back of the postcard.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

I designed this project working with curator, Emily Zilber, and graphic designer, Nick Pioggia.

This exhibition explored the field of contemporary craft, focusing on artists who combine traditional skills with cutting edge concepts and technologies. More than 30 artists were included, working within a broad range of materials and practices. 

Spatial Organization

As a way to shape the visitor’s path and organize the content, I created a continuous platform that cut through and around the three adjoining spaces of the gallery.

In shaping the platform, the sharp angles allowed me to direct the path in a way that framed certain works, emphasized relationships and created focal points, such as at the intro panel.

Design Elements

The construction of the platform complemented the theme of the show, combining traditional materials and building methods, made of painted wood, with the finished appearance of a contemporary machine intervention, in its sharp, strong angles and razor thin edge. 

For the intro title, the graphic designer, Nick Pioggia, and I wanted to again express a union of hand and machine. We laser cut the title out of a 1/2” sheet of walnut and inset that sheet into the larger intro wall, leaving the walnut bare. We used the negative of the cut out letters for the title in the back foyer.

All photographs are courtesy of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2022

In the Spring of 2022, I worked with the entire Art of the Americas Department at the MFA to redesign the top floor of the American Wing, re-presenting the 20th century in an inclusive and more accurately representative way of the American people.

This project included six permanent gallery spaces and one temporary exhibition. Each gallery had a unique curator dedicated to its theme. The themes included: Latin America, the Southwest, Art and Jazz, War and Spirituality, Nature and Abstraction, Folk Art and Modernism, and a temporary exhibition titled Touching Roots: Black Ancestral Legacies in the Americas.

Design

The casework was either newly designed or adapted to work with the visual language of the larger American wing. Within this overarching aesthetic, the design of each gallery was given its own distinctive style and unique design elements to accentuate its theme. For example, ambient music and Art Deco patterned wall paper in the Art and Jazz gallery and a ceramics table display referencing Pueblo architecture in the Southwest gallery. The wall color palette across the floor was limited to four colors in the permanent gallery spaces, used in contrast and conversation with each other to create unity but allow for distinction across the themes.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2021

I designed this exhibition with curator Jenn Swope and graphic designer, Eben Haines.

Fabric of a Nation looked at the history of the United States through quilts made from the 17th century through today, and the multiple voices, personal narratives and perspectives expressed by the quilt makers.

Design and Organization

The show was organized chronologically in seven thematic sections: Unseen Hands, Crafting a Nation, Conflict Without Resolution, Legacy of the Civil War, Quilt as Art, Modern Myths and Making a Difference.

To introduce the exhibition, I created a large curved wall at the entrance to showcase a comparison of three quilts, made by three different women at three different points in history, all referencing the United States Flag.

Because the show presented parallel narratives though time, and a range of cultural representations, I had to consider how to display works of art whose stories belong in conversation but are aesthetically very different. Some spaces needed to be intimate and some more open. Some works straddled time and narrative. To create these fluctuating moments of conversation and visual comparison with a feeling of continuity and flow, I angled the walls to tilt and shape the path from one space to the next, also using color as an additional way to define and create space.

Interactive Response Section

After a section with particularly difficult content, we created a reflection space. In addition to books, poems and a collective journal for writing, we installed a large, thick pile carpet vertically on the wall. Visitors were invited to write or draw into the carpet creating an ephemeral, tactile and collaborative experience to react and respond.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2018–2020

I designed this exhibition with curators Emily Stoehrer, Nonie Gadsden and Meghan Melvin, and graphic designer, Nick Pioggia.

Reacting to industrialization, there was a renaissance of hand-craftsmanship in Boston at the turn of the 20th century. This exhibition highlighted the “Boston look” of Arts and Crafts jewelry and metalwork that emerged during this time.

The exhibition included 75 works, including jewelry, tableware, accessories and design drawings in a compact 600 square foot gallery.

Color and material

Because of the small scale of the gallery, a dark and rich paint color helped create a feeling of intimacy and allows the cases stand out and shine against a dark backdrop, making the whole room feel like a jewel box.

The cases were made of metal or painted wood, with thin frames to match the delicacy of the work. Stained wood details were brought in into the space with seating and as part of the text panel to add warmth and a sense of materiality to the space.

Layout

In order to fit many objects and themes into a compact space, the perimeter of the gallery was lined with casework, highlighting a new theme on each wall. In the center were two low table cases where a three dimensional objects could be seen in the round.

Case design and lighting

The cases around the perimeter acted like small display windows, inviting close looking. Each case was wired with small magnetic spotlights hidden below, behind the labels, and above, on the case’s metal frame, to allow each piece to be spotlit without light bleed outside of the case.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2019

I designed this show working with curator, Layla Bermeo, and graphic designer, Nick Pioggia.

This exhibition looked at the influence of Mexican folk art on Frida Kahlo’s work. Many artists in Mexico City’s intellectual circles collected traditional folk art as a celebration of national culture. Kahlo collected and lived with these objects, drew inspiration from them and incorporated their qualities into her paintings.

Design and Color

For the case design, platform design and color of this exhibition, I drew inspiration from the interiors of Kahlo’s home, La Casa Azul, in particular the dining room. We chose pale yellows for the walls and wood stain for the cases. The shape and proportions of the cases referenced the furniture in her space. I made these design choices to enhance the mission of the show—to present the objects she was surrounded and inspired by in the way in which she choose to display them.

This exhibition was situated in two galleries among the 20th-century floor of the American Wing in the Museum. I recreated the green door frames at La Casa Azul and built them into the thresholds between galleries at the Museum to signify the show’s boundaries.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2016

I designed this show working with curator, Katie Hanson, and graphic designer, Nick Pioggia.

The concept of this exhibition was to pair four major works by Picasso, loaned from the Foundation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland to the MFA, with Picassos from the MFA's own collection of similar subject matter. The show presented an opportunity to examine Picasso's prolific nature and method of exploring the same forms in multiple ways and at various stages in his career.   

Design

The design was an intervention in the gallery space of five freestanding walls that wrapped around and jutted out from, but never touched, the perimeter wall of the gallery. Each new wall held one pairing. The location, shape, and positioning of the walls complemented the shape shifting nature of Picasso’s explorations, and performed the function of setting apart each pairing as an individual study. The labels were intentionally placed off to the side to encourage looking at the formal visual comparison without interruption. 

All photographs are courtesy of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2018

I was the exhibition designer on this show with curator, Meghan Melvin, graphic designer, Eben Haines, studio manager, Quinn Corte, and production by Neal Johnson and Cyrille Conan.

This exhibition traced the history of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories written by A.A. Milne and illustrated by E.H. Shepard through an immersive display, taking visitors directly into the story setting, while being surrounded by drawings, letters, photographs and ephemera.

The show first opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum and then travelled to the MFA. Most of the nearly 200 works on view were drawn from the archives of the V&A.

The Visitor Journey

The show began with a large case filled with ephemera that showed the vast reach of Winnie-the-Pooh across cultures and time. Boardgames, a dress, dolls, and dishware are some examples of objects on view.

Next, the visitor was taken into Christopher Robin’s childhood bedroom and introduced to Milne and his family. This room had a period bed, lighting, original dolls and drawings, and a window seat with a period style phone through which you could pick up and listen to the author reading while you looked through the window into the story scape a few rooms ahead.

From there, one walked through Shepard’s studio and was introduced to the illustrator. In this room, I found an old drawing table that we converted into a case for works on paper. This was another instance where one could peak through the window and view a few rooms ahead, seeing the realization of the story from the view of the illustrator’s studio. The bead board and wall color were chosen to match Shepard’s original space.

After that, with an option to enter through a child-size recreation of Pooh’s front door, the visitor entering into an immersive story-book space. This included lighting, projections, hanging word mobiles, full scale wall graphics, interactive puzzles, a full scale bridge and trees, a drawing table and an area carved out for inside Pooh’s house that included a slide. There were many spaces to explore and to tuck away with a book.

Amidst this backdrop, we hung drawings in playful clusters, arranged by theme and with large text panels to give them presence in the space.

From this immersive story book space, the visitor was taken by a serpentine like gallery wall where the topic of the art of book design was covered and continued throughout the rest of the exhibition.

This exhibition was a lot of fun to work on and a true team effort to accomplish.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2016

I designed this exhibition working with curator, Marietta Cambareri.

This exhibition featured 50 objects produced by the della Robbia family workshop in 15th century Florence. The della Robbia family invented a technique for glazing terra-cotta that achieved opacities of white, blue, green and yellow not seen before. The secret recipe and technique was passed on among the family, but then lost when the workshop closed after about a century.

Design and Layout

This exhibition was organized in three sections based on virtues for daily life in Renaissance Florence: Hope, Love and Faith. I created three open spaces in the rectangular gallery that bled into one another and allowed for works that bridged themes. 

The first section, Hope, contained all of the domestic objects. The ceiling was lower to enhance the domestic feel. At the back of this space was an 11 foot wide, 1000 lb overdoor that lead into the main room of the exhibition. 

The masterpiece of the show was a life-size sculpture of The Visitation in the middle section. I designed a slight niche behind it, and a raised platform, to set it apart and allude to its original setting. For the architectural details in the show, including wall details and the pedestals, I used subtle references to Renaissance architecture while maintaining a modern simplicity. 

Color and Lighting

Color is important to the della Robbia story. The show began with a dark blue entry space, low light and spot lighting to showcase the domestic objects that were made for a more intimate private setting. In contrast, the rest of the show opened up with a brighter palette of light grays, showcasing the blues and greens in the work and allowing the whites to pop.

Photographs courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2019

I was the exhibition designer for this show working with curator, Helen Burnham, and graphic designer, Nick Pioggia.

This exhibition celebrated 19th-century celebrity culture in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, prints and paintings were shown among a variety of art forms including film, dance and music to create an immersive experience that captured the spirit of the time. The exhibition was organized into thematic sections highlighting Lautrec’s artistic innovations, such as dramatic lighting and color combinations, his expressive illustrations of life in cafes, cabarets and theaters, and of celebrities themselves. The design and experience was meant to immerse the visitor in the colorful, delightful and expressive spirit of this time and place.

Immersive experiences:

Woven throughout the show were videos paired with music from the period. A film of the Eiffel Tower by the Lumiere Brothers was in an early section about Paris by Day, a video of the Can Can dance was in the Cabaret section, surrounded by red velvet curtains and under string lights, and Loie Fuller dancing the Serpentine Dance was shown at the very end on a curtained stage set.

Color and lighting:

Rich jewel tones were chosen for the wall colors to complement the work and add drama and contrast to the experience. Moody and dramatic spotlighting was used in the cabaret and theatre sections and in contrast to brighter sections about daily life.

Casework:

I used two types of case designs in the show. In the first galleries, introducing the artist, I designed solid wooden cases to display the earlier work and especially to have a custom presentation for some double-sided drawings. As the show progressed and started talking more about the changing social landscape of the time, I introduced casework that recalled the ironwork of the art nouveau style, adding a table top and bonnet to found iron-looking bases.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2016-17

I designed this exhibition with curator, Meghan Melvin, and graphic designer, Nick Pioggia.

This show was a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the children’s book, Make Way for Ducklings.

Design and Spatial Organization

This exhibition was set in a small 900 square foot gallery space. In order to create two distinct spaces—a bright area to view drawings and a quiet more intimate reading space—I built a small room within the room. I used wall color to create a quieter feeling of intimacy inside the interior reading room and a brighter more active space around the perimeter.

Casework

I designed thin framed wooden table cases, painting them black to complement the dark ink marks against the white page of the drawing, maintaining simplicity to focus on the drawings.

To help make a smaller space feel more open, I cut out a window case in the interior room to display sculptures of Officer Mike and the ducks. This peak-through also created a link between both spaces.

I designed a soft, velvet covered bench in the interior space to bring warmth and texture and extend an invitation to sit down and read.